Why Nikki Haley Will Never Be President

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I've read the online social media posts about how some people are hoping that Nikki Haley will get the Republican nomination for president instead of Donald Trump. After all, with most of the Republican primary contenders having already dropped out unusually early in the primary phase, she is the one who stands the best chance of defeating Trump. (Ryan Binkley is also running for president as a Republican but, so far, his campaign hasn't got much attention.)

The big plus with Nikki Haley is that she is pro-Ukraine and she has called Vladimir Putin a tyrant. That is opposite Donald Trump's complete deference to Putin (mainly because Russia has given Trump money in the past whenever he had hit a financial snag). She said that Joe Biden has legitimately won the 2020 election, which puts her at odds with Donald Trump and many Republicans of his ilk. She has also denounced the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and has called for prosecution of the participants.

I hate to sound like a Debbie Downer but I don't think she will ever get anywhere near the White House. Yes I think it's great that she stands with Ukraine and she's rational when it comes to the outcome of the 2020 elections and the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol but that's not enough for her to win.

For liberals and moderates in general, she has taken stands on domestic policy that would turn them off. She favors invading Mexico to eliminate drug cartels, increasing the age when senior citizens can receive their Social Security benefits, busting unions, cutting taxes for the wealthy while hiking them on green energy companies. She has also said that Florida's infamous “don't say gay” law doesn't go far enough.

She would need mostly Republican votes in order to win the presidency and her stand on domestic issues that they also favor won't be enough to sway them. There are her views on Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, which is alienating to a Republican Party that has gotten incredibly cozy with Putin over the past 25 years. The Republicans want to replicate the kind of society that Putin created in Russia where there is free enterprise that's dominated by the oligarchy and most civil liberties are curtailed. Haley's anti-Putin stance is a turn-off for them.

But there are some even bigger reasons why Republicans, especially Trump supporters, will never vote for Haley. As I wrote in a previous post about the GOP in general and how Russia has infiltrated that party, the Republican Party is no longer just a pro-business party that had a few progressive tendencies (such as ending slavery, integration of public facilities, reducing pollution, and busting monopolies). Their shift away from their previous stance began in the late 1960s when Richard Nixon reached out to disaffected white Democrats who were against the Civil rights movement as part of the Southern Strategy. These disaffected white voters were the spiritual descendents of those who favored keeping slavery legal and, when that was no longer possible, favored segregation between whites and blacks.

Over time, as more Republican politicians catered to those whites, the more reactionary the party became when it came to issues like equality for all. It has gotten to the point where they became racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.

This is why Nikki Haley will never become president. She can adopt all of the most extreme views in an effort to appease the MAGA wing of the Republican Party that she wants and they will never take her seriously. She has two qualities that ensures that the Republicans will never take her seriously and there is nothing she says or does that will change their minds.

One is that she is a woman. Remember in 2016 when another woman, Hillary Clinton, won the Democratic primary? That success unleashed a huge amount of hate by the Republicans because of their misogyny. These are the kind of Republicans who believe that women should be seen and not heard, unless they are women who echo their beliefs on all of their stands on all of the issues like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They think that it's bad that Haley has already articulated independent thoughts on Vladimir Putin, the 2020 election, and January 6. They aren't going to risk Haley taking an independent stance on other issues by voting for her because she hasn't acted as a deferential woman.

The other quality that she has that turns off Republicans is an even bigger one: She is a person of color. Both of her parents immigrated to the US from India. She may not be African American (which would be an even bigger turn-off for these racist Republicans) but she isn't white either. The Republican Party have a hard time fully accepting non-whites in public office. As I wrote in my previous post about the GOP, the Republicans totally lost their minds when Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States. They started the Tea Party movement (which was the spiritual successor of the pro-slavery/pro-segregation/Southern Strategy crowd) against President Obama just weeks after he was sworn into office. They also spread the birther nonsense about President Obama being born in Kenya instead of his actual birthplace of Hawaii. When Donald Trump created his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, the Republicans glommed on to it as the spiritual successor of the pro-slavery/pro-segregation/Southern Strategy/Tea Party crowd.

One of the big reasons why the Republican Party wants to defeat Joe Biden at the ballot box is because his vice president is Kamala Harris, who, like Nikki Haley, is both a woman and a person of color. They can't stand the idea of the possibility of the first woman president of color should something happen to Biden where he could no longer perform his duties as president. If the Republicans are horrified at the potential of a woman of color occupying the Oval Office, what makes you think they would elect another woman of color directly to the Oval Office?

If all that weren’t enough, Donald Trump is using Haley's background as the daughter of immigrants to attack her and sow doubts about Haley actually being a US citizen. This is similar to how Trump attacked Barak Obama when Trump flirted with the idea of running in the Republican primary in 2011. Never mind the fact that, like Obama, Haley was born in the United States, which makes her eligible to run for president under the US Constitution.

Also, like it or not, Donald Trump has maintained a stranglehold over the Republican Party despite the fact that he has lost the last election. Unless he dies, goes to jail, or even decides to suddenly leave for Russia or any other country with no extradition treaty with the US, it's very likely that he will get the Republican nomination. It didn't have to be this way. It could have been completely avoided had the Senate voted to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection when he was impeached for the second time in 2021. Had that happened, he would have been prohibited from ever holding public office again. But, no, the Republican majority in the Senate were so incredibly spineless that they decided to ignore the fact that they could have been killed when the rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6 and voted not to convict Trump. Now they have to deal with the consequences of their horrible decision.

The bottom line is that, given the current political climate, there is no way that Nikki Haley will win the Republican primary, let alone the general election. Liberals and moderates will be turned off by most of (if not all of) her policies while the racism and sexism in today's GOP just makes it impossible for anyone who isn't a white heterosexual Christian cis man to get elected to the nation's highest office.

And, no, she won't be Trump's vice president pick either. The Republicans can't even tolerate a woman of color like Kamala Harris being vice president under Joe Biden. They certainly wouldn't be thrilled with a woman of color being vice president in a second Trump Administration.

Hey, look on the bright side. Joe Biden has sided with Ukraine despite having to deal with those Republicans in Congress who want to cut all defense funding to Ukraine because they have become so pro-Putin. Plus Biden is way better on domestic issues than Haley. Hopefully he'll be reelected in November.

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